Moving towards Social Europe? The EU post-2008 crisis economic governance regime under review.

Photo by Yanni Koutsomitis

Following the 2008 financial crisis, the European Union adopted a new economic governance regime. As Jamie Jordan, Vincenzo Maccarrone and Roland Erne explain, some scholars have argued that this new regime places greater emphasis on social objectives. Drawing on a new study of labour policy interventions in Germany, Ireland, Italy and Romania between 2009 and 2019, they demonstrate that this is not the case, with EU interventions continuing to be shaped by a liberalisation agenda.

Is migration from Central and Eastern Europe really an opportunity for trade unions to demand higher wages? Evidence from the Romanian health sector.

The social failures of the eastward enlargement of the European Union can hardly be ignored anymore. Instead of becoming part of welfare capitalism, Central and Eastern European workers’ hopes in a better life were betrayed and social rights have been undermined. In turn, workers, left without industrial and political channels to voice their social concerns, have reacted by leaving their countries en masse (Meardi 2012). Nevertheless, several industrial relations scholars predicted that the balance of class power would soon shift again in workers’ favour, due to the labour shortages in sending countries caused by “workers voting with their feet” (ibid.). Some scholars even saw in the massif exit of CEE workers an opportunity for CEE unions to win higher wages (Kaminska and Kahancová, 2011). By focusing on the distributional aspect of wage policies adopted by two competing Romanian trade unions in the healthcare sector, a recent study by Sabina Stan and Roland Erne published by the European Journal of Industrial Relations challenges the assumption of a virtuous link between migration, labour shortages and collective wage increases. 

Why socialism can be nothing else than ‘real’: Lessons from ‘really existing socialism’ – Part I.

There is widespread consensus today, right and left of the political spectrum, that ‘really existing socialism’ in the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe was a proven historical failure to construct society on the basis of collective property and common access to resources produced in a society. In this guest post, Sabina Stan from the Transnational Labour Project in Oslo critically questions this understanding and asks what the real lessons from ‘really existing socialism’ are for the understanding of today’s capitalism.